


what i have vowed (i will make good)

by Nocturnememory



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 1930's, 1940's, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, F/M, Female Harry Potter, In the Muggle World, Period Typical Attitudes, Sort of? - Freeform, With memories of who they were, Wool's Orphanage (Harry Potter), World War II, themes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:21:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 6
Words: 11,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26877376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nocturnememory/pseuds/Nocturnememory
Summary: There is no moment of realisation.No sudden, flickering light.It sits heavy, iron in the blood, a magnetic pull—there’s a boy with a flop of dark, propping himself up against the rungs of his crib and she thinks, as her heart starts to beat steady and sure—Oh, there you are.(In which, Harrie and Tom grow up together and the past (or the future) is a not so distant thing.)
Relationships: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle, Harry Potter/Tom Riddle | Voldemort
Comments: 45
Kudos: 371





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文-普通话 國語 available: [【中文翻译】我所许的愿（我必偿还）](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27007651) by [Lwnixndk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lwnixndk/pseuds/Lwnixndk)



> Scenes/one-shots/prompt fills of Tom and Harrie growing up together. Not in any solid chronological order.
> 
> Pretty much just lighthearted fluff ngl.

* * *

* * *

_‘I’ve got to go back, haven’t I?’_

_‘That is up to you.’_

_‘I’ve got a choice?’_

_‘Oh yes.’ Dumbledore smiled. ‘We are in King’s Cross, you say? I think that if you decided not to go back, you would be able to … let’s say … board a train.’_

_‘And where would it take me?’_

_‘On,’ said Dumbledore simply._

_It’s our choices that show us what we are,_ he’d told her once, but there’s a baby, she’s sure it’s just a baby, scabbed and raw-looking, tucked beneath a bench seat. 

_You cannot help,_ Dumbledore says, even though there’s something in her chest that feels like she’s being tugged towards it.

The baby whimpers and Harrie’s ribs ache but she leaves it lying where it is as Dumbledore tells her the truth of it all; in all its mess and hope and pain and happiness.

 _There’s always a choice,_ he tells her as a train sounds in the distance, _and it’s always been yours._

Harrie isn’t so sure that’s true.

(She boards the train and falls into her mother’s arms and her father’s chest and Sirius’ laughter. It’s perfect and it’s home and all the things she never got the chance to have as a child. All the things she dreamt about, wished for, wanted since she was a little girl.

But sometimes, in all those sunny days, perfect Quidditch games, endless jokes she can’t help but feel like she’s heard before even though they seem new every time she hears them… there’s a tug, a pull, an ache inside of her like she’s missing something.

 _I think I’m forgetting something,_ she says into her mother’s shoulder as Lily strokes a hand through her hair and says, _it’s your heartbeat, love, it takes some time to get used to._

And it’s true, Harrie realises, in the hollows of all the laughter and the smiles and the endless summer-sunshine filled days, Harrie’s chest is a silent, still, empty thing.

 _Right,_ she thinks, _I’m dead._

But the feeling doesn’t go away, and some nights, some mornings, some too-quiet moments where the dead remember that they are dead… Harrie hears a thud, two-time thump-bump in her chest.

Some days she wakes with a scream in her throat that feels like a baby’s cry.

Some days she wakes and sees a white ceiling, feels a hard cot beneath her, dark wood bars around what she thinks, she’s _sure_ , is a crib—

Some days, no matter who she spends her day with, no matter how long she hugs someone, or how hard she laughs… she feels _alone._

So alone.

 _Don’t worry, kiddo,_ Sirius tells her, _I hear mine sometimes too. It sounds like a sheet hung on a clothesline caught in the wind. Like curtains hanging in front of an open window._

 _Oh,_ Harrie thinks, and remembers an empty veil in a cavernous dark room.

Her heartbeat doesn’t sound like anything, she thinks, just a heart beating, but sometimes… sometimes she’s sure it sounds like two.

And then, one day she wakes with a scream in her ear that turns into a pitching wail out of her own lungs and there’s a baby with a flop of dark, propping himself up against the rungs of her cot and she thinks, as her heart starts to beat steady and sure—

_Oh, there you are.)_

(Or, she doesn’t.)

Dumbledore tells her not to pity the dead, Harrie—

But pity those who live without love.

And there’s a moment across a battlefield that was once a school, looking into the eyes of a once-was man, once-was boy, once-was thing beneath a bench—

Harrie says, _try for some remorse, Tom._

But it all plays out the same. The scene starts and ends and the monster dies just like everyone else.

On the ground, empty.

Months later, as Hogwarts turns from battlefield back into a castle, back into a school, back into her home, Harrie thinks it all feels just like that last moment.

Empty.

In all the flashing photos, the fresh-printed newspapers, the streamers and screamers shouting about victory—saviour, champion, Girl Who Lived Twice—

Defeater of Voldemort

Harrie can’t help that feeling that nags at her ribs, hides in the hollows of her body and mind.

There’s something _missing._

Sometimes, sometimes she swears she hears a baby crying.

She wakes on her New Years Day with her heart pounding, with a taste on her tongue like copper and pennies, with a woman’s voice in her head, far off and distant, saying _name him for his father and mine—_

The name sits in every blink, in every moment before she opens her mouth, but it fades into a crackling fire that doesn’t quite warm her the way it should.

 _I feel like I’m forgetting something,_ she tells Hermione as winter fades into spring and melts into summer.

 _Maybe you should talk to someone,_ Hermione says with a careful look, _You’ve been through a lot._

Harrie nods, but Hogwarts is looming and they’re all supposed to be teenagers again, aren’t they? No matter that there are new ghosts in the hallways and singe marks still scorched into stone walls.

No matter that sometimes, when she’s alone, she hears a baby crying like wind through the empty castle, and sometimes, sometimes when she looks up at the red drapes of her four-post bed, she blinks at a white ceiling instead.


	2. Chapter 2

* * *

* * *

There is no moment of realisation.

No sudden, flickering light.

It sits heavy, iron in the blood, a magnetic pull—

Wool’s orphanage is not a cold place. Or an empty one. But it is empty. The floors are dark and faded and creaky. The walls are off-white, smudged grey, patched with pigment in lighter shades. The windows howl and cry and mourn in quiet moments, and the building groans like the weight of the children inside is a burden on its foundations.

Wool’s Orphanage is a place more filled with sound than softness.

She’s one and he’s two and he stands at her crib-side, his hands clenched on the rungs, he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t reach for her, just stares at her until one of the older girl’s pick him up and takes him away.

She’s three and eleven months, and he’s five and six months and looking down at her in the crib, a stool pulled up, hair a dark flop over his forehead. A voice calls him away but he stares down, grey-eyed. Harrie’s small hand touches his, just a brush, small fingered, a curiosity curved on the wood crib rail just before the matron pulls him away and sets him back in his own cot.

She’s four and the long straight line of small cots and cribs are separated by a creaking step, cold toes and then the hard of a mattress beneath a small knee.

The blanket lifts, folds over her; his breath warm and soft on the back of her neck.

They don’t speak unless spoken to. They don’t speak to each other. The matrons, nuns, young girls who follow at their command, whisper, _odd pair, those two._

There are prayer and sharp elbows, sharper voices trying to peel them apart, but he’s a dark smudge somewhere near her or she’s a little sun, orbiting because he’s six and leading and she’s not quite five and trailing; his hand sticky in hers, the juice of a shared apple on their lips, a sweet crispy tang on the tongue and a tiny, toothed-scraped core hidden among the weeds.

She doesn’t say thank you to him, and the matron scolds them for the stick of their fingers before dinner, but later, after she’s slipped across the aisle from her bed and into his, she’s sure he knows it anyway.

She’s five and he’s six. There’s a snake in the long grass of the shore-front; it’s brown and not quite green, near-hidden and winding along the earth.

Tom looks at her and there’s a hush, a rush of salt and wind and the laughter of children behind them chased along the surf.

(And an exhale, whisper, sliding along castle stones, a winding snake-body slipping behind castle-walls and calling, all empty-bellied— _come, come to me—_ )

There’s sand between their toes, stuck in the sweat of the back of their knees; stuck between their fingers, linked together.

 _Sspeakers,_ the snake hisses.

_Riddle, why you always hanging out with a baby. Can’t make any friends?_

She’s eight, and he’s nine and nearly too tall for the beds in the children's wing. Harrie doesn’t say, curl tighter, but his knees press up along the back of hers anyway.

There are lessons and prayer and the sting of a switch anytime a tongue slips.

(In the afternoon, after lessons, before dinner, or sometimes much later, he slips out, a shadow boy slipping through the gate, comes back with a devilish glint of white teeth in the dark and some sweet thing to melt on their tongues. Or a glint of a switchblade in the moonlight; _nicked it_ , he whispers, and then grins.)

She smiles and his finger, slippery from fruit or sticky from candy, press in a dimple, a little catch of his nail on her cheek. 

She’s nine and he’s ten and too tall for the cots in the children’s dorm no matter how tight he curls up around her.

Now it’s one hundred and seven steps (sixty-eight of them creaking, one hundred and six of them cold-toed) to get to the boy’s hall, all the way across building and through the dining hall.

Harrie counts them all until she’s slipping through the door and a thin arm lifts a thin blanket and she slips into the warmth of his bed.

His arm lowers and his knees hit the back of hers.

_I could tell the Matron she’s been sneaking in—_

He’s ten and there’s a drip, splatter of red running down his shirt front. He sniffs, smears it along the back of his forearm when he wipes his nose. Harrie rips the underside of her uniform, the hem of the cheap cotton lining beneath the scratchy wool skirt; it turns red, stained with his blood when she presses it against his nose.

 _You're_ stupid, she says, but proudly, through red teeth and a crooked smear of a grin, he shows her the blood on his knuckles. _But I won._

Later, when the matron scolds her for the tear in her uniform, Harrie lies: _it was Billy Stubbs, Matron Cole, he pushed me and my dress ripped._

(And then later still, under thin wool, on a hard mattress, they wait, breath baited, warm and condensing beneath the covers, but no one comes to separate them.)

Billy avoids Tom for a week, his lips split, his eye black whenever he works up the nerve to even look their way.

They don’t know anything but this, she thinks, but sometimes she catches Tom looking at her and she knows that it isn’t what he knows.

 _It’s different this time,_ he whispers, _having you._

She knows he’s telling the truth, because somewhere, in the back of her mind there’s this little itch of a memory, mist in a vial, and a boy all alone on a small bed saying: _I can make things move without touching them. I can make animals do what I want them to do, without training them. I can make bad things happen to people who annoy me. I can make them hurt if I want to._

_\--and confess—_ thwick _–our sins to God—_ thwick _– he will forgive us—_

And later, Tom’s is stiff but dry-eyed, the skin of his back too hot, too red, beneath her fingers, Harrie asks, _wouldn’t it just be easier to say your prayers the first time?_

Tom reaches back, his hand trembles, but only in the moment before he tugs on her wrist and pulls her down beside him.

His eyes search hers, his breath warm, mingling into hers as he says: _but I, with shouts of grateful praise, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will make good. I will say, ‘salvation comes from the Lord._

And Harrie presses her hand on the hot skin of his back, over the lines criss-crossing his skin, her hand small, spread wide, his heart thumping beneath her palm as she replies:

_And I am the Lord._

She’s nine and it’s nearly as cold inside as it is outside. Their stomachs talk more than they do. There’s a cough spreading along the halls, too-thin children, bodies wracking. The whole of London feels ill, half-starved, grey-faced to suit the weather.

She says, _why did you come back older?_

He’s ten and it’s December and they both know what’s coming.

Summer comes after the rain; after the young green smell of spring burns up under the sun and turns hazy and sweat-salty; Harrie is almost ten, _just hours, really_ and Tom smirks, tosses an apple up and says, _cinema_?

 _You’ve got eight pence?_ Harrie frowns, licks the bright tang of crisp red and Tom shifts his eyebrows, mouth crooked with a smile that gets more and more crooked every day.

 _I will,_ he says.

Dumbledore arrives in the high heat of summer, when London streets are thick and the air even thicker; it hangs heavy, and sweat makes their clothing stick to their skin. Tom’s hand slips along his forehead, Harrie’s fingers chase a rivulet at the back of her neck. Most nights, they sleep without blankets, but no less pressed together.

“He’s supposed to be alone,” Mrs Cole scolds, pulling Harrie up and off the bed with a tight hand around her wrist. “He got caught nicking things again.”

“It’s quite alright,” Dumbledore smiles, and Harrie’s stomach wobbles because she thinks she should know him, he’s there sometimes, in her dreams, in things she knows without really knowing how she knows. A lemon-scented memory, a kind voice, someone she trusted once, but…

But Tom looks at her from the bed, and she knows his lips taste like fresh bread, just like hers, because they’ve just slipped back into the room after stealing a small loaf from the fancy bakery in Westminster. (Sharing it on the walk back to the orphanage; the bread still steaming inside, the crust cracking as Tom tore into it.)

“Childhood friendships are wonderful things, aren’t they?” Dumbledore says and neither one of them can stop their laughter.

"She can stay," Tom says looking back to Dumbledore and there must be something the older man sees in his face, or maybe it’s just Tom because he’s always been good at convincing people of things even if they aren’t really sure why they believe him.

Dumbledore nods after a long moment, looking away from Tom and back to to Mrs Cole.

Her hand eases off Harrie’s wrist as she huffs, smoothing a hand over her skirts, her keys jingling on the ring before she turns to the door.

“Come see me before you leave, if you would, Mister Dumberdore,” she says, and he nods a quiet _of course_ , as she leaves.

Harrie glances at Dumbledore before sliding back over to sit beside Tom on his bed, pressing her thigh up against his.

If Dumbledore thinks it’s strange or is curious at all about why a boy of eleven is so sure a girl of ten should stay, he doesn’t say anything about it, moving towards the little desk and chair that houses some of Tom’s school work and books and many more bits of loose paper filled with silly doodles by Harrie.

He turns the chair towards them, taking a seat and fixing the deep-purple suit jacket he has on.

It clashes a bit with his hair, a deep auburn, neatly tied back behind his neck, his beard is the same colour but, Harrie thinks, much shorter than she thinks it should be. Neatly trimmed and thick where she thinks, she’s sure, it should be long and white.

Harrie glances at Tom again, but he’s looking straight at Dumbledore.

Dumbledore leans forward and offers his hand, his blue eyes twinkling as he looks at her. “Albus Dumbledore,” he says kindly and Harrie takes his hand with only the briefest hesitation; he smells a bit electric, a bit like rain, and nothing at all like lemon.

Even though she thinks he should.

“Harrie,” she says and feels a strange tingle in her hand when he shakes it in greeting.

 _Harrie_ , he repeats and offers her a little smile. “Short for Harriet?”

She nods, even though she isn’t so sure it’s true, sometimes her teachers scold her with the name, _Harriet, eyes forward, sit straighter, you’d do well to listen better._

“Sometimes,” she says and then nudges Tom, who gives a little huff of a breath before holding out his hand.

“Tom Riddle,” he says easily, but Harrie can feel the tension in his body next to hers. “Short for Thomas, so they’ve said.”

“Of course, Thomas, the very young man I’ve come to see.”

There’s something in the room and it makes Harrie’s stomach all tight, but she isn’t sure what it is. Tom and Dumbledore hold their handshake for another moment before Tom pulls his hand away, his jaw tight.

When he looks back at Harrie, his eyes are heavier and she’s sure he knows something about them, but she doesn’t know what he could know. Unless he’s reading their minds, or memories but— but that—

She can’t remember it all well-enough, she thinks. It’s there but just out of reach. She isn’t sure how Dumbledore would know anything more than they do.

The moment breaks and Dumbledore offers them another smile with crinkled eyes.

“You seemed quite certain Harrie should stay,” Dumbledore starts, looking between the two of them. “I’m quite curious, I must admit.”

Tom swallows and, for a moment, he looks all of his eleven and a half years. “She’s like me.”

“Like you?”

 _Special,_ sits in her mouth, her memories maybe, but she’s never liked the word. They just _are._ Tom says it sometimes, _special_ and _different_ and _you and me, Harrie. It’s always gonna be you and me._

Harrie’s hand itches to do something, to show him, a little flicker of a desire to show off that she thinks might be Tom’s and not hers, even though she wouldn’t mind showing what she can do, too.

Tom is tense beside her as he pushes out a sharp-edged: “ _Di_ _fferent_.”

There are things she remembers, things she doesn’t, things Tom knows and remembers and can whisper about before they happen, and even more things neither of them can remember so much as they just feel it. Like the grip of a wand, the spill of magic, phoenix feather, yew and holly.

Sometimes she doesn’t even realise she knows it until it happens, like a lightbulb or a moment of déjà vu.

Tom does not trust Dumbledore.

Not even now, when things are so different and they've got each other and a past-future that doesn't matter. Not really.

“Different,” the older man nods, folding his hands in his lap. “Then the other children?”

Tom’s jaw tightens and Harrie steps in, because her throat itches and her palms itch and it’s all Tom’s irritation and his want to show off. Even at eleven, with no wand and no reason to know any of the things he does.

“We can do things, sometimes,” she starts, leaning forward a little and tucking her hands beneath her thighs to keep herself still, to not jump up and say, _we know all this already. See, see, we can both go, can’t we?_

Dumbledore’s brow lifts and he smiles slowly. “What sort of things, dear girl?”

Tom’s irritation is a spark at her side. Harrie ignores him.

“Sometimes… sometimes the power goes out and we can make the lights come on, even though they shouldn’t. We can make things move without touching them. Sometimes... sometimes animals will do what we want them to do even if we don't train 'em. And sometimes--”

_We can talk to snakes,_ she thinks but doesn’t say.

Dumbledore’s instructions to enter Diagon Alley are as crisp and unread as the day he handed it to them after they'd told him that they'd be just fine on their own. They're no strangers to London, more at ease in the streets than the professor looks, in his deep-purple suit and oddly long auburn hair.

They slip through the crowds, just another pair of kids that are just a little skinnier than they should be; but they pull on their nicest Sunday clothes and scrub thier hands and faces until they almost fit into the streets of London that are just a little bit nicer. The ones where men still have steady jobs and mothers stay at home, where kids have never gone to bed hungry. Where there's soft fabrics and lace hems, shiny shoes and... and pocket change.

(Where they slip along the street in their Sunday best, slink through the crowds, sneak a shilling, a pence, half-crowns and some pocket lint to add to the stipend that Dumbledore had sent for schoolchildren 'in need.')

Tom looks back at her over his shoulder, his hand to the brick wall.

"Ready?"

Harrie laughs, _whenever you are._

Mister Ollivander frowns when he looks down at two children, lost to laughter, Tom’s wand gripped in his fingers.

_Yew, Phoenix feather, 13 and one-half inches._

She’s ten and he’s eleven and there’s an apple, a promise and a train whistle.

She’s ten and Wool’s Orphanage is empty.

She’s ten and he’s almost twelve and his hair is a little shorter, a little too clean and the steam hides his face for seconds, but it’s enough to make her stomach lurch.

His grin, when it comes, is enough to put it all back in order.

 _Glad to see me?_ Tom smiles, wrapping a thick green scarf around her neck that smells like wood and fire and a place lost to memory. (But most of all, it smells like him, the back of his neck, the curve of his jaw.)

"Thanks for coming back for Hols," Harrie mumbles, stuffs it into his chest, his coat damp from snow.

His fingers are cold but still warmer than hers when they link together. _I did promise._

She’s eleven and Tom Riddle’s hand is young and (re)learning the scratching point of a quill, he writes, _no_ and _thank you_ and _we’ll manage just fine,_ when Albus Dumbledore offers his services to Harrie Potter and her magical (re)introduction.

Harrie rolls her eyes, leaning against his back, their spines aligned but for the head of height that she doesn’t know when he got.

She doesn’t ask him not to send the letter though.

She’s eleven and Ollivander’s hand hesitates over the box, Tom’s breath slinks along the curve of her ear, _Holly, Phoenix feather, 11 inches._

Ollivander looks back, _I remember you two, laughing like pixies. Now, how did you know?_

 _A hunch,_ Tom smiles and Harrie steps on his toes.

* * *


	3. Chapter 3

* * *

* * *

There’s a man handing out flyers along the street, sheets of paper dipped in red. She knows what it is, has heard the whispers like all the others.

The young man glances at her, his hat tipped low over one temple, he looks her over and says, _any interest in a revolution, kid?_

“I’m twelve,” Harrie says, and scuffs her scuffed patent shoe along the uneven cobble street, leaning against the building. She holds out a hand because really, what’s to say?

The man grins, hands her the paper and knocks the rim of his hat, sweat on his temples. "Never too young to know where you stand," he says before he turns to go.

 _Fools,_ the matron would say, _wouldn’t know what to do with power, if they ever managed to get it. Which they won’t, God chooses his voices and these men and not it._

Harrie doesn’t think this has much to do with God at all, but rather a lack of much more simple things, like shoes or soap or rooves. Empty stomachs and empty pockets and empty hands.

Leaning against the stone building, she watches the man a moment longer, his sleeves roles, the hem of his pants frayed and a little too short and wonders just how the matron thinks that this is at all how God _provides._

And then her stomach growls and she sighs, looking up the street again, waiting for a familiar flash of dark hair.

When it comes, he isn’t alone and Harrie scowls, crossing her arms and trying her damndest not to pout.

“Hullo,” Tom grins and tosses her an apple. The boys around him are laughing and shoving and chattering, loud things like crows around a bag of feed that only opens when he feels like it.

Harrie sniffs and rubs the apple on the still clean front of her Wool’s orphanage uniform. Tom’s jacket peeled off some time ago, his shirt sleeves rolled, suspenders hanging off the broadening of his shoulders.

It's hard sometimes, she thinks, to remember he’s something like a man stuck in a thirteen-year-old body. And she’s something like a woman stuck in a nearly twelve year old one.

“What you been up to, then?” she asks and sinks her teeth into the apple.

Tom shrugs, “There’s some upper street boys that were wandering around where they shouldn’t be.”

“You’re going to get us in trouble,” Harrie scowls and swallows. “The matron will kick you out if the coppers come round again.”

The other boys laugh and Tom smirks, looking back at them as they nudge him.

She hates this part of him sometimes, the one that draws people in, that lets him set a mouth to a dirty, hungry ear and lead them a little further astray.

“You’re going to get them all in trouble,” she mutters and takes a too-large bite.

“Ay,” a boy laughs, “but we got a pretty pence or two.”

“And a some new shoes,” another boy laughs and scuffs the bottom along the stone.

“And you’ll see the back of copper’s wagon if you aren’t careful,” Harrie glares at him. "And they'll take those shoes right back."

“She’s no fun, Tommy, let’s go, maybe we can head up towards—”

Tom shakes his head, “That’s it for today, Harrie’s not wrong, you do too much and you’re going to get careless and caught.”

He waves them off, shrugging off another offer to join them and the boys head down the street, their laughter like crows fresh from a scavenge.

Tom leans against the wall beside her, the street goes a little quieter as their voices fade, just normal street sounds, car honks and conversations, a horn from the docks, not so far off in the distance.

“How much you get then,” she mumbles around another bite, cheek full.

Tom’s lips twitch and he rolls onto his shoulder to look at her, pulling out a handful of coins from his pocket and a little gold ring.

“You’re an idiot! Why’d you take a ring, Tom!”

“It’s fine,” he frowns and stuffs it back in his pocket. “I’ll head across the river, make sure I’m well out of the area before I sell it.”

“It’s not the point, nicking coins is one thing—”

“Harrie, shut up,” he glowers. “It’s just some cheap band off some fat-bloke who came out to scare a rabble of boys off his end of the street. Probably not worth much anyway.”

Harrie makes a face at him, annoyed. “You’re gonna get locked up and then what, huh?”

“I’m not gonna get locked up, Harrie, Jesus, calm down.”

“You calm down,” she glowers. “You were supposed to be nicking food, not rings.”

“We nick food,” he says, and steals the mostly eaten apple out of her hand. Harrie watches him clean off the last of it, chucking it across the street with an aggressive throw. “Works better when it’s me and you, yeah? Those boys wouldn’t now subtley if their lives depended on it…”

He shrugs, mouth tugging into a smirk and he pulls out the ring again and grabs Harrie’s hand. The ring is too large to fit anywhere but her thumb, but he slips it on and folds his fingers around hers.

“But we look trustworthy, you and me,” his head lolls back against the stone building, looking down at her, mouth crooked. “I mean mostly you, but it works.”

Harrie wrinkles her nose at him, wiping her sticky hand on his shirt and he laughs, pushing off the wall. “Come on, I want to grab something before curfew.”

Harrie spends the rest of the afternoon spinning the ring along her thumb, or Tom’s thumb strokes over it whenever he takes her hand in his and Harrie can feel the skin-warmed metal slide over her skin.

He takes it back before they turn onto the street that leads to the orphanage, stuffs it back in his pocket and Harrie knows it will end up under the loose board at the bottom of the closet in their room.

At night, he pulls it back out and when he crawls into bed beside her and slips it back onto her thumb, he says, _it’s your birthday soon and all, though I’d get a little extra so I could get you something nicer._

And he does. Even though she tells him not to.

It's a dress.

A soft cotton thing, a row of white buttons up the front, a colour that reminds her of the ocean, but something out of a dream, white cap waves, white sand, long grass beaches she's never been to.

She looks at herself in the small mirror that hangs on the inside of the cupboard, her fingers doing up the last of the buttons, on her tiptoes to try to see a little more of herself.

“It looks good,” Tom says, watching her from the bed. Harrie looks over to him, trying and failing to hold back a smile.

“You’re a bastard,” she says and crawls up the bed to drop down beside him. For whatever she’ll say about it, Harrie rubs her hand along the cotton, smooth fabric on her thigh; her legs bare, sock-less inside the quiet of this room, no need to cover anything under propriety. It’s lighter than any dress she’s ever worn, and it feels a thousand times cooler in the heat of the room now, compared to the layers of her uniform.

Tom plucks at the hem, leaning on one elbow to look down at her. “It does.”

“We could have used that money for both of us.”

Tom fiddles with a button, not saying anything for a long time, long enough that the quiet settles between them, broken only by the city noises coming in through the open window. A hope for air flow that doesn’t ever really come.

“Technically,” he starts, and skims his hand along her side to make her squirm. “I know who my father is an all.”

Harrie laughs, _still a bastard._


	4. Chapter 4

* * *

* * *

_‘Now may God bless you all. May He defend the right. It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against- brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution- and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.’_

Prime Minister Chamberlain’s voice sits hollow along the street, crawls out open windows, the world silenced, stilled in the wake of Britain’s declaration of war. A city street immobilised; ears piqued, breath held in the chest. It sits in the ear like the tinning sound of a popped eardrum; impossible not to focus on once you hear it, rings louder, resounds, fills the mind up until—

Tom looks at her, lit by sunshine, sleeves rolled and three shirt buttons loose. The death days of summer sitting slick along his temples, mussed hair, warm damp of the cotton shirt between the growing widths of his shoulders.

He looks at her, and Harrie hears:

_(Muggles remain ignorant of the source of their suffering as they continue to sustain heavy casualties)_

And a voice, no, two voices, no, the crackling static of a radio, no, the bite of winter—

the sound of an achingly familiar voice saying—

 _Potterwatch_.

And Tom looks at her. Lit by the London sun.

He frowns, confusion, curiosity, concern— it sits on his face, sinks his eyebrows as he lifts his hand and he reaches for her. His fingers brush her arm and Harrie jolts back, stumbles and thinks only of a name she hasn’t spoken outside of those moments caught between nightmare and waking, those brief moments before the weight of his arm sunk them back into the dark.

_Voldemort._

And Chamberlain says, _that we shall be fighting against- brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution—_

Harrie turns, just as the world restarts, as Londoners react to war arriving on airwaves in their homes. She starts walking, no mind to it, no thought to it but to be as far away from that name and the boy that houses his memory, as she can possibly get.

There’s crying, voices rising, grim acknowledgement as the news spreads, one wide-eyed Londoner to another.

She just needs to be away.

“Harrie, where are you—” her name starts as a question, twists into anger, his stride long, footsteps in the echo of hers.

Harrie walks faster (a radio, a tent, a girl saying, _hush, Ron, we know it’s—)_

“Harrie,” it’s harsher, less question, Tom hisses her name like it’s an emotion and not just letters.

“ _Harrie_!” His hand grabs her arm, tugging her back to face him.

And he’s lit by sun, a boy caught at the edge of being a man she never met, a monster she did, a nightmare she knows— knew—

“What’s wrong?” and there’s anger etched into worry etched into distress and it all sits as bright as the sun on his face; his eyes steel lit in a glint, deadly sharp.

“It’s you,” Harrie lets it out of a too-tight chest, lungs constricted, half air and barely any voice.

His confusion sharpens, his hand tightens, his mouth opens and—

The air fills with the winding, growing scream of the raid siren, it fills the streets, routes through their feet along their bodies, a pitch of a sound that’s nothing but terrifying.

“Harrie,” he says her name again, nearly lost beneath the rising wail of the raid alarm, the sounds of a panicking street, terror in the distance as Londoners fall into war.

“Where’re your masks!” a woman passing, stride quick, tugging on her own gas mask as she stares at them, standing in the middle of the street, more focused on each other than the noise. “You need t'get to a shelter—”

Tom’s look is barren, but his eyes are sharp, filled with something dark in the absence of his expression. The woman stutters back a step, her mask slipping in her hands as she turns and all but runs the other way.

“We should go,” Harrie says, looking at the tan line just visible in the v of his open collar, their summers always spent outdoors as much as possible, roving streets, to the edges of the town, the London Zoo. This summer no different, despite the threat of war hovering so close. “She’s right, it’s not—”

“Nothing’s going to happen,” Tom steps closer, his hand runs up her arm, over the cap sleeve of the dress. (The one he bought, a light, soft cotton thing, for her birthday.)

Something eases, loosens the tight, locked up bones of her spine, the twist of her insides unwinding as his hand cups the side of her neck, as the memory of just hours ago rises up inside of her, when she pulled it on and he had rolled out of bed and said, _mornin', Harrie,_ with his lips to her cheek.

“How d’you know?” Harrie asks, eyes flicking up to meet his grey. Stupid question, really, she thinks. Probably the same way she heard… those voices, memories, things that haven't- that won't happen. Not this time.

“What’d you see?” Tom asks, eyes searching hers, voice low beneath the whine of the alarm.

Harrie shakes her head, curling her fingers into the fabric of his shirt and stepping closer.

“Heard somethin’,” she mutters into his chest, breathing in the scent of him beneath the cotton and the surrounding smell of London.

“What?” his hand curves around her neck, scratching into the baby fine hairs beneath her braid at the nape of her neck.

London seems empty but for them, no radios, no voices, no cars or trucks or children at all. Just the wail of a warning filling the September air.

“Don’t matter,” Harrie mumbles, closing her eyes. “Tom.”

“Hm?”

“How much money you got?”

“Some,” he shrugs. “Why?”

“Enough for a night in the Leaky?”

He nods, chin brushing her head. “Sure. Tell me what you saw?”

“No.”

He sighs, irritation bursts in her blood, a flash of it, a demanding feeling like he wants to force it out of her. But he doesn’t and Harrie feels her spine loosen more, the other name fading: these bones are the bones of Tom Riddle, thirteen-year-old orphan, not the bones of a monster she never knew. Not really.

The siren ends, silence reigns and nothing falls from the sky.

He's right. He almost always is. ( _Always am, Harrie,_ he'd say, if you asked him.)

He doesn't say _I told you so,_ but she hears it anyway as he leads her towards Charing Cross and the Leaky Cauldron.

The barkeep looks at them, sharp-eyed; a grey rag rubs lazy charmed circles over the worn polish of the bar top beside him.

“Off for some Hogwarts shopping, are yeh?”

Tom lays his hand on the counter, the coins clinking against the bar. “One room, one night.”

The barman looks down, to Tom, to Harrie, eyes narrowed. “Where yeh parents?”

Harrie smiles, stepping closer to Tom’s side. “We still had shopping to do, they dropped us off early. How much for dinner in the room?”

The barman looks down at Tom, then to Harrie; eyes narrowed. “Six sickles.”

Tom’s hand tightens in hers, a tick in the sharp edge of his jaw.

Harrie sets seven coins on the counter, her smile bright, “You think we could get some tea as well?”

The barman looks down, from Harrie to Tom; “Third floor, second door on the right,” he says as a key appears, old and iron, _302_ in red ink along the little attached tag.

“Thank you!” Harrie grins and pulls Tom along behind her. Their footsteps echo on the stairs and Tom lets Harrie lead him along the creaky steps, the creaky, dim hallway and into a creaky, but clean, room.

As the door shuts behind them, Tom locks it with an absent flick of his finger.

“Did you conjure those?” he asks, leaning against the door as Harrie moves further in.

She grins over her shoulder, dimples deep in her cheek; toeing off her shoes, shucking stockings in an awkward one footed hop, and then plopping onto the bed, graceless, loose-limbed, a bright spot on the dark sheets.

He watches her and feels—

Her head tilts up, brows lifted. “What’re you doing?”

It’s not that he’s never thought about it, about her; his bright, young thing in every world.

It’s not like he doesn’t remember her; fourteen and bloody, fifteen and chasing a woman through marble halls a curse on her tongue— seventeen and— 

Not like he didn’t try more than once to sway her to his side when he was half a man, half a creature with a body to match the ruin of his insides.

Even then, even he—that twisted monster he was, had offered, slipped along the soft edges of her mind to try to drag the Girl Who Lived into the shadows with him. Tarnish the crown, tame the wilful tongue; tempt Harrie Potter, like the snake tempting Eve in the Garden (But this snake was one she bore in her body already) offering knowledge, power, freedom—

But now, _now_ Tom toes of his own shoes, lying down beside her on the bed and Harrie, _his_ Harrie, sinks into his side with no words at all.

He feels—

“What were you thinking about,” he asks, desperate for a distraction, feeling heat crawling along his stomach. “In the street?”

There’s no answer for long enough that his mind rolls off becuase he's thirteen and subject to the whims of his body, to imaginings, to memory of her, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen and—

The room feels too warm, he wishes she'd say something.

“The War,” Harrie says quietly, after a too-long stretch of silence, her head turning to face him. The warmth in him fades just a little, for the depth of something haunted in her eyes; far too old, too many years for the childish roundness she still carries in her face. His eyes no different, he knows, though his childhood fades by the day into the leaner angles of his face in the mirror.

He knows she doesn’t mean the war that will cross headlines come tomorrow morning, knows she doesn’t mean the one that will fill the skies of London, death bursts of falling stars ready to wipe a city off a map. Not this war.

_The War._

_Their War._

He rolls over her, tucking his face into her neck. Her fingers slip over the nape of his neck, her palm warm, a little damp, and for awhile, for a time, nothing else matters but synced-up rhythm of thier heartbeats beating together.

WAR DECLARED IN MUGGLE BRITAIN

The paper sits wrinkled on the table, left dog-eared and mulled over, crumbs and marmalade on the pages beside two empty teacups and an unmade bed. A pair of stockings left behind, inside-out on the floor.

On the train, beneath the chugging, over the din of Hogwarts students sticking their faces to the windows, greasy fingertip, nose-tip squeaks as they point _there, look—_

Tom looks at her, their legs tangled across the train compartment, his eyes bright in the sunlight soaking in through the window.

He says, _they’ll be fine. Nothing happens yet._

Above them, the drone of the Royal Air Force heading towards Germany.

.


	5. Chapter 5

* * *

* * *

She doesn’t fight it, this time.

The hat settles over her forehead, her eyes, musty and still warm from the last head it rested on. She expects its voice to rise in a swell, old magic, old memory, winding through her head.

But its silent, Harrie listens to her heartbeat, the echo in her chest, her palms a bit damp as she grips the edges of the stool beneath her.

_Now, what would he do, girl, if I put you in Gryffindor?_

Harrie bites back a laugh and thinks, _separate rooms have never stopped us before._

_Well, then, colour me intrigued, best be Gryffindor!_

Tom’s face, when Professor Dumbledore removes the Sorting Hat from Harrie’s head and her eyes find his in the rows of Slytherin green, is _furious._

Harrie smiles, slips off the stool and gives him a little wave; making her way to her House table, smiling at the clapping and the _hullos_ and _welcome to's,_ when she finds a boy, hunched at the end of the Gryffindor table, twelve years old and already very nearly too large for the bench seat.

Harrie throws out her hand, her smile bright and cheek-achingly wide. “Hullo, I’m Harrie Potter.”

He looks at her, taller than her and still seated. “Rubeus Hagrid,” he says slowly with a little frown of confusion but it cracks into a smile as Harrie takes his massive hand firmly in hers and gives him a body shifting handshake.

“Heya, Hagrid, nice to meet you.”

His hand closes around her upper arm, stealing her out from the mass of Gryffindor First Years huddling along the corridor, Algie Longbottom leading the way to Gryffindor tower.

The torch lights shift shadows along the floor as he walks her backwards into an alcove, the voices of her House fading, the footsteps of nervous, excited First year Ravenclaw’s growing steadily louder.

Her back hits the wall with a dull thud, the cold stone seeping in through her uniform.

“What were you thinking?”

His jaw shifts, Harrie looks up at him, the head of difference between them, (a memory, like a slow blink, of just how much more he’ll grow.)

“You can’t always have your way,” she whispers and reaches up, tugging him down. He bends, because—

Because it’s what he does now, just for her.

“You’re stubborn. And a brat,” he mutters into her hair but his arms wrap around her waist as hers wrap around his neck.

He lifts her, just enough to make her feet dangle, just enough to shift her weight into his in a physical way instead of just that incessant phantom one neither one knows what to do with.

He lets her go, (moments, decades), seconds later. His mouth brushing her cheekbone, breath a little like pumpkin juice.

“You’re going to regret it,” he says and Harrie punches his arm because she knows she's right, he can't always get his way, no matter how much he might want to.

(She won’t admit, staring up at the red of the oddly familiar, oddly not-quite-right red of her big, empty four-post bed later that night, that he's right.)

Tom’s voice shifts like the crackle of a radio, hums deeper, dials high. Harrie chases the flush of his cheek with her mouth, laughing a taunt into his ear about how his voice pitches until his hands slip along her sides, cracking her voice, breaking it open into laughter.

“Why is there a Gryffindor, a _Gryffindor Firstie_ in our dorm room, Riddle?” a boy who looks remarkably like someone Harrie remembers only in a burst of laughter, the sound of a dog barking, a crowded photograph, a smell of old leather beneath the nose, leans against a bedpost, arms crossed.

Tom doesn’t bother untangling from her, twisting his neck to look back at the dark-haired boy, his voice lower, steady despite the slight breathless edge of mirth. “Because I want her here, Black.”

Harrie waits, heartbeat slowing, ears ringing in the sudden silence, looking between them, at the boy who is three quarters a memory of someone else, and then to the broadening edge of Tom’s jawline.

Black looks away first, eyes sinking low. He makes a _tsk_ of a noise, but pushes off the post and moves away.

Tom looks back down at Harrie, his eyes bright as his lips tilt, smirk all slow like a long note of music, fingers inching—

Harrie knees his side, laughter bursting.

The water drips, there’s a heavy locking charm on the door and the drip echoes or grows quicker, Harrie isn’t quite sure, but it bounces and trips along the room all the same.

“Have you been down yet?” she looks at him, leaning against the sink, arms crossed, hair dark and perfectly parted, looking as cold and distant as the white tile on the floors.

It’s a lie, he’s eager, or nervous, or something a bit like both all at once; a shadow to his eyes, a tightness of his shoulders.

“Harrie—”

She steps up to the sink beside him, breaking eye contact only when she bends over, her thumb finding the smooth curve of a winding snake-shape carved into the tap, her breath fogging over it as she exhales: _open._

Tom’s breath stutters in his chest, a rush of it from his nose.

“Still a pretty terrible idea to put the entrance in the girl’s toilets,” Harrie drawls, her hand finding his as the sinks shift, groan, grind open. “Ready?”

Tom doesn’t answer, his hand tightens, holding her back, “There’s still the Basilisk—”

“Good thing we can talk to snakes then, isn’t it?”

“We should put in steps,” Tom sniffs, brushing off the back of his trousers as Harrie does the same to her skirt. “What a stupid way to get in.”

Harrie doesn’t need to bite back a laugh, her humour fades as the damp smell, the distant drip, the—

The sense of leaking bravery, a percolation out of her spine onto cold, damp tile.

A rush of voices, histories slip and slide like wet slick fingers along the edge of a bathtub.

Tom steps forward, and the torches light, a burst of noise, a rush of wind, a groan all long and foreboding off in the shrinking dark of the chamber.

“Heir of Slytherin,” Harrie aims for a smile, but it slips off as well.

Tom closes the distance; his palms are still so warm despite the cold tips of Harrie’s own fingers as she curls them into his shirt, just over his belt, his body warm through the cloth, heat seeping out of him.

The motion, the slide of his hands up her arms, over shoulders, her cheeks—

Harrie braces, pushes away, heart tripping in her chest—

He follows, pulls her back, breath too hot against her forehead.

His lips press, and for a moment, a brief blinding moment Harrie has no idea why he does it.

(It doesn't bother her, it never has, the memory of why she has a scar is barely real at all. But she knows it meant something once, to both of them.)

“Why you always spendin’ time with that Slytherin, anyways?” Hagrid lets Harrie cling to his back, kept up and out of the heavy snow as they tromp (he tromps) over the grounds towards the greenhouses and Herbology class.

There is something much more familiar about the half-giant when his face is half lost to folds of a dark scarf like the thick of a beard he doesn't have yet.

“Why not,” Harrie shrugs, or tries to, it gets lost in the layers of her clothes.

“Well, he…he’s a Slytherin, an’ all,” Hagrid does shrug, jostling Harrie. “And you know, I mean, I heard some things ‘bout ‘im—”

“What’d you hear?” Harrie asks, sniffing, curious; she hasn’t heard much in Gryffindor, a spattering of whispers, prying eyes whenever Harrie slips out or Tom slips in through the portrait hole.

(A few blushing eleven-year-olds, her dorm mates, _Harrie, he’s a boy—)_

“Just that he’s a bit…well, scary.”

Harrie laughs, “Scary? Hagrid, you’re like…two feet taller than him.”

“Yeah, but you ain’t,” he huffs. “And I never said I was afraid a ‘im.”

There’s a wave of heat and thick, dark earth as the greenhouse door swings open, students heading in a rush of relief from the cold; Hagrid ducks low, easing through the doors and lets Harrie slip off his shoulders, peeling off her hat and unwinding her scarf.

Hagrid, flushed and struggling with his slippery coat buttons, looks down at her. “Well?” he questions. “What's it w'you two?”

Harrie isn’t quite sure how to answer; what’s to say really?

_Oh, I killed him once, didn’t you know?_

And now, well… _nothing quite so bonding as death, is there?_

But that’s such a massive understatement that she has to bite her cheek to hold in her laughter.

“We grew up together,” she says, and is very thankful for the lifting of Professor Beery’s voice, ushering them to their stations. “It’s…complicated.”

The school empties for Yule Holidays, and Harrie all but runs to the dungeons as the last of her house leaves. Her steps echo, shoes clipping along the empty halls; Slughorn scolds her as she reaches his office just as he’s leaving it, Harrie slows, an apology echoing to follow him, _Sorry, Professor!_ as he passes her by.

Turning back, Harrie gets tugged sideways, a hand darting out—

Harrie turns, mouth opening when Tom’s grin, white and wide, rolls into view as he yanks her into the recently emptied office.

“In an awful rush Firstie, where you off to?” he teases, voice light, smirk crooked.

“Got a boy to see about an empty dorm,” Harrie grins. “Heard nearly all the Slytherins head home for Hols, you think he’d mind the company?”

“Never,” he laughs. “I think he’d be quite happy to have you.”

It isn’t until later, with his breath on the back of her neck, knees tucked against the back of hers, that Harrie thinks—

 _Slughorn_?

But it’s gone by the next morning, lost to his voice in her ear, his lips on her cheek chasing the warmth of sleep.

_Merry Christmas, Harrie._

It’s the first one (it’s not, once there was a freckled boy with a wool sweater) that they laze in pyjamas, a brightly wrapped gift box of chocolate and hard lemon candies neither one really favours and two pairs of socks in colours that make Tom sneer. Another gift, lumpy and misshapen, wrapped in a twine bow, a book on creatures, not quite ministry approved.

And later, with their breath puffing white, cheeks flushed and hand in hand, they cross the grounds, hiking through the snow; there’s a shack that’s not quite as rundown as she thinks it should be and Tom’s glove tipped finger-pointing, and saying, _one day, I'll get us something bigger than that._

(And then on his birthday, with their stomachs full and Tom making his way through a stack of books from Slughorn, Harrie says, _I don’t really care about the size, you know.)_

The gas mask sits on the bedside table, one on his in the Boy’s Hall, hers in the Girls, and one more in the solitary room that the Matron still believes works as a means of separation between the two. Like a locked door is a barrier, really.

(Harrie imagines, though she’s never bothered asking, that the reason he skips prayer, refuses to recite, or curses in the vicinity of any nun or nurse, is that he prefers this solitary, bare room to the Halls, despite the lashing that generally preceeds the ‘punishment.’)

Tom’s leaning (slouching, though he won’t ever say it) against the wall behind the bed, his thin pillow barely any comfort or relief from his sore back. Harrie’s stretched out, pressed up against him, head pillowed on her arm and looking at the dark rubber mask with its hollow eyes.

“It’s kind of…scary isn’t it,” she mutters. He hums a ' _what's that?',_ half an ear ever attuned to Harrie’s voice. “The mask.”

“Probably wouldn’t do much anyway,” he murmurs, a page flipping. “There are still nerve agents and chemical burns, it really only protects against respiratory effects.”

Harrie blinks at it, then flicks a finger towards it with a little push of magic and the thing tumbles off the desk and out of sight. She flops onto her back, looking up at him, the black shadows hinting along his jaw.

She scrapes a finger over the sparse stubble, a man in inching follicles.

“You’re such a comfort, really, know exactly what t'say.”

His eyes flick down at her and the book thuds, snapping shut between his long fingers; it hits the bed with a thump a second before he shifts lower, rolling half on top of her. “I could just stop you breathing. That would work as well.”

“Always about homicide with you, isn’t it?” Harrie sighs or tries to, but his body weighs her down.

He hums, leaning on one elbow, looking down at her, the summer night too warm, the window cracked, letting in the thick of London air, the constant noise, rolling engines, voices and arguments caught on the summer wind. They’re both stripped to shirts and underthings; to his shirts, since Wool’s Orphanage has never given much concern to the weight of its fabrics, especially to the layers involved in a girl’s uniform.

“I’ve been really rather good,” he says quietly and strokes a finger from the centre of her forehead down along the bridge of her nose, his eyes following the path. “A few minor skirmishes.”

“What happened to Malfoy then?” Harrie questions, already knowing the answer.

His lip twitches but he reigns the smirk in. “Needed a reminder, I suppose. He’ll be just fine by summer’s end, I’m quite sure. Though I doubt he’ll get out much.”

“One simply can’t be seen without the proper, aristocratic nose,” Harrie smiles, tries not to, but his eyes crinkle, just a little at the corners as he watches her; it’s infectious, looping between them, she thinks. Something like that.

Tom smirks, smiles, a pleased laugh; his finger touches her nose again, a little tap. “That was the idea.”

”What’d he do anyway?” Harrie scrunches her nose, shifting his finger.

He shrugs, smile faltering. “Commented on something he shouldn’t have.”

Which, Harrie knows, means something quite a bit more like: _you_.

Being the Heir of Slytherin, a product of an ancient line, holds up quite nicely in a dungeon full of those who value blood, or family, or spout parental rhetoric like they have any true understanding…but add Harrie, his little, his too-bright, his not-quite-shadow… and _Half-Blood, Orphan, Fraternizer,_ becomes a rather easy, low hanging fruit to turn into a harsh whisper when Tom’s aspirations reach too far.

He is only thirteen, after all.

“You could…not,” Harrie edges, meeting his eyes, all pale and young and hiding nothing, not really.

 _Not_ , which means something quite a bit more like: _stop_.

His eyes shift over her face, her forehead, dart down to her mouth and back to her eyes.

Eventually, when the room fills once more with the sounds of London, distant, too close, ever oppressive, Tom rolls off, stretching out onto his back, arm still stuck beneath Harrie’s head; his pulse slow, his eyes on the ceiling.

He lifts a hand, and his lips move, her palm itches, twitches and the feeling spreads to her fingertips as a ball of light grows, spreads wide, an expanding bubble made of light blue gaseous glass. It curves around them, the world quiets, London fades and their legs are tangled together, their skin damp with summer heat and all there is is a pulse, one heartbeat and two chests.

“I’m quite prepared for any attack, the masks are useless.”

And Harrie knows that this means something really, quite a bit different.

* * *


	6. Chapter 6

* * *

* * *

The shop bell chimes, Harrie’s eyes dart to the door, quill stilling in her hand only long enough to see the woman enter, well dressed and obviously wealthy.

The woman wanders in, looking over the Borgin and Burke’s eclectic collection of items, a hesitant curiosity on her face; Harrie looks away, returning to filling in the leger with the sales they made that day as well as adding and labelling the new inventory that Mister Borgin had dropped off that morning. With her chin in her hand and leaning against the counter, Harrie hears the backroom door open, shut and the creaking steps of Tom emerging.

Harrie half listens to the woman’s heels click over the wood, a quiet greeting broken by a small laugh, all airy bright.

She fights the urge to roll her eyes and looks up again.

Tom’s hand slips out of the woman’s, returning to his side; his hair loose, falling across his forehead, his shirt sleeves rolled over the thick of his forearms, a shirt button undone… looking rumpled but altogether far too appealing for a eighteen-year-old shop boy organising inventory. Especially in consideration of the summer heat that hangs heavy over London; cooling charms only do so much for so long before the sweat-stick of summer becomes a bone-heavy thing.

Harrie looks away again, letting Tom lead the woman around the shop, his voice low, catching at the edges of her awareness like a low humming tune she's always been wired to.

_I think I have just what you’re looking for._

Harrie stretches, cracks her spine, taps the tip of her wand against the last inch of water in her glass and watches it fill and then, reaches out and touches the tips of her fingers to it, watching the clear water frost over, condensation gathering and sliding down the glass in lazy rivulets.

She looks over the shop, swallowing the ice-cold water, looking for—

The woman sets a hand on Tom’s arm, her body tilted towards him, a thin silver chain looped around her wrist, set with ruby stones. A bracelet, Harrie can see, item 803, said to be crafted and embedded with something like Felix Felicis and to be worn only for small amounts of time; wear it too long and it can burn you, literally and figuratively.

Tom smiles at the woman, a crooked, cocky thing; that roguish one full of, _I’ll eat you up—_

Harrie scowls, her glass clunking against the counter, water sloshing onto the wood in an icy chill. Tom glances up, his eyes meeting hers, his eyebrow twitching up and the tilt of his mouth just a _little_ more crooked, more honest, more _deadly_.

Harrie watches him lead the girl to the register, watches him from the corner of her eye, watches his fingers scrape the woman’s wrist, watches him unlink the silver chain, half listens to him say, _it looks lovely—_

Watches the woman watch Tom as he slips the charm into a small velvet box, watches him charm the dark ribbon that decorates all their jewellery boxes to wrap around it in a neat little bow at the tip of his wand.

Watches the woman watch Tom, her teeth scraping her lip, her cheeks pinked by his smile as he leads her to the door and doesn’t miss the _surely you don’t work every evening—_

But her voice is lost to the chime of the opening door and then Tom’s footsteps, the creaking of the old-wooded shop floor, nearer and nearer.

And then, he’s behind her, the heat of his body like a current of air between them, his breath ghosting over her cheekbone, an _almost_ slip of his lips over her cheek, his hand reaching for her quill, plucking it from her fingers.

With a flick of his finger the pages flip, a dry shift of parchment until he finds the page he's looking for and dark ink soaks into the page as he draws a long thing line through, _Bracelet, Felix Felicis, 200._

And then writes: _300._

“Oh, you _prick_ ,” Harrie bites out and slips off the front of the stool, ignoring the grunt of air forced out of him as her stool knocks into his stomach.

“I know what you’re doing,” she says over her shoulder, heading towards the backroom, flicking her wand at the front door as she goes, a quick jolt of magic that makes him grin, all wide and white and predatory as the sign on the door flips from _OPEN_ to _CLOSED._

She hears him follow, hears the backroom’s door shut with a soft thump, hears his footsteps closing in and she waits until he’s near enough, until she can practically feel his smirk on her skin—

And turns, her hand knotting into his shirtfront as she turns them both, shoving him into the heavy wood shelves that line the walls.

His breath jolts out, the dark of his eyebrows twitching up, his mouth opening—

So Harrie shoves him again, stepping against him, tugging at his shirt to make him bend and when his mouth opens again it’s only to meet Harrie’s mouth.

His head tilts, his hands sinking beneath the skirt of her dress, over the heat of her thighs, curving around them all heavy and rough and eager as Harrie reaches up, scraping her nails through the heat-damp skin at the back of his neck, up into his hair, sinking her teeth into his bottom lip to tear a grunt, a spasm of his grip, to make him pull her in closer, tighter, to squeeze air out from between them until all there is, is skin and heat.

His mouth breaks away, teeth scraping her jaw, his fingers scraping over her hips, around the band of her underwear, shoving them down until they slip loose and fall to the floor. “What am I doing, hm?”

He hauls her up, the world shifts and her back hits the shelves, air jolted out of her this time instead of him.

“Revenge,” Harrie gasps out when his mouth latches onto her neck, sucks a mark against her pulse, his tongue hot and heavy when he moves lower, hands bruising into her ass to pull her higher, to put his mouth to her clavicle, scrape the thin skin.

“I am not—” Tom’s breath is hot, and Harrie reaches up, grabbing onto one of the shelves above her as he reaches beneath them, the clink of his belt buckle, the heat of his mouth, the shifting weight of his body as he shoves his pants low enough. His cock bumps against her and the feeling spikes through her, a hot roll of it through her body.

“—that petty,” he grunts, and Harrie eases her grip on the shelf above them, grips onto his shoulders, her nails scraping the hair at the nape of his neck, up into his hair to tug, yank his head back, bring his mouth to hers and—

“Liar,” she forces out, half a hot laugh caught between their lips, but then he’s easing inside her and her breath twists into a sharp inhale, a sharp little curse, a sharp kiss more like a collision.

He sinks inside of her, holding himself still so Harrie can roll her hips, can adjust, clinging onto his shoulders, the tilt of his body pressing her back against the shelves as she inches herself down. Tom’s fingers, sharp, white-tipped little aching bruises in her skin as Harrie takes a little more and a little more, her inhales turning to curses turning to his name and an urging, _Tom, Tom—_

And then his hips roll forward, cock deep and hot and hard and it breaks her voice open as she breaks the skin at the back of his neck; he groans, scrapes his teeth into her bottom lip before licking into her mouth.

 _Maybe,_ he grunts between one roll and the next.

“You started it,” he says into her thigh, a press of his lips as Harrie tries to get one shaky leg into her underwear, still half-leaning on the shelf for balance.

“I did not,” she laughs, breathless, finally managing to get her foot through the hole. Tom tugs the bit of cotton up her legs and presses a kiss to her hip bone before righting the wrinkle of her dress as he stands.

“No?” he lifts an eyebrow and Harrie tilts her head back to meet his eyes, to meet his mouth when he presses his lips to hers, all soft and slow and slick sticky sweet from the heat sill lingering in the backroom. When he turns his head and lets his lips slip over her cheek, he breathes out, his voice all light and pitched airy: “ _Oh, Mister Avery it’s lovely…_ ”

Harrie laughs, bright and sharp and sudden in the quiet, heavy heat of the shop. “What was I supposed to say, it was a gift.”

“How about,” Tom offers, his hands stroking over her sides, “Mister Avery, I am with someone better than you in every conceivable way...”

“And he’s got a wonderful cock too,” Harrie says into his neck, her fingers pulling lightly through his hair.

“Fuckin’ right’,” he hums in her ear, a pleased low sound, pressing a final biting kiss to her jaw before he leans back. Harrie watches him put himself back together, watches him watch her, his eyes dark. “We should do this more often.”

“Fuck against a shelf?”

“Drive each other mental,” he says, lips quirking into a smirk and adds, “Then fuck against a shelf.”

Harrie grins, smacking her hand into his arm, “Come on, we have to reopen before Mister Burke gets back.”

They’re heading out the door, the chime a soft sound in the dark of the late evening, Knockturn Alley quiet and shadowed, the cobblestone path lit by moonlight, when Mister Burke’s voice rises from the depths of the shop.

“Oh, one last thing,” he calls out, laying the evening security charms on the backroom. “Perhaps the next time you two feel so… _roused_ , while at work, you would consider cracking a window in the backroom."

Harrie freezes, Tom’s eye twitches, his voice tight. “Yes, sir, I ap—”

“Oh, no need. Just be aware that there are a fair few fertility items on that shelf,” he grins, lifting a hand in parting, his eyes bright with mirth. “Have a lovely evening, you two.”

Harrie chokes, coughing as the door shuts and Tom pulls her down the cobblestone street, laughing into the dark, his arm heavy over her shoulders.

"They’re fakes," he says with a grin. "Don’t worry. Completely useless."

Harrie chokes a little nervously relieved laugh, easing into Tom's side, the night cool and his body heat warm against hers.

And then he adds, as they head down the cobbled-street towards their little apartment in Diagon: _Pretty sure, anyway._

* * *


End file.
